[Buddha-l] Protestant Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

On Sunday 28 January 2007 17:15, Richard Hayes wrote:

> After sending off my list of attributes that might attract the P-word as a
> label, I remembered an incident when I was still on the board of directors
> of what was then called the Zen Lotus Society. We were revising our
> constitution, and the society's founder, Samu Sunim, was adamant that we
> include a clause making him president and spiritual director for life. His
> justification was  "We don't want this society to be like a Protestant
> congregation, in which the congregation can fire the minister if they
> become dissatisfied."

One further interesting irony to this story is that Sunim's authority as a Zen 
master was conferred through a quintessentially Protestant process. In the 
19th century in the United States of America, a good many Protestant 
ministers became ministers simply by "gathering a congregation" (as the 
expression went). If a person could get people to listen to him, he was a 
preacher, and if the preacher could get listeners to build a church, then the 
preacher was a minister with a congregation and a church. (I used the 
masculine pronoun, but several famous women preachers gathered congregations 
in New England.) No degree from a seminary was needed, and no nod from a 
synod or any other authorizing body was required. 

This was exactly how Samu Sunim became a Zen master. He had never been given 
the equivalent of inka and had not been sent by any organization as a 
Buddhist missionary to spread the Dharma to American savages. He was not even 
a monk any more, though he had been and still claimed he was one at that 
time. He just gathered a sangha, hit them with a stick and barked at them 
when they did something foolish. Interestingly enough, he was quite good at 
it and helped a lot of foolish people. He still does. What could be more 
Protestant than that?

Sangharakshita's story is not so different from that. This is no doubt why the 
FWBO has been seen by some as a Protestant Buddhist outfit. (Obviously, I am 
drawn to renegades and self-proclaimed spiritual authorities. It's amazing I 
haven't yet become a disciple of Benito!)

Several years ago I heard a fascinating lecture by Paul Groner on the topic of 
self-ordination. Apparently there was a recognized procedure in Asia of being 
ordained without a formal ordination ceremony. As I recall, it involved 
having a dream of being ordained directly by the Buddha. If someone else also 
had a dream that a person was ordained by the Buddha, then the ordination was 
considered valid, provided the person lived as a monk and followed all the 
vinaya rules. 

Sunim's claim to being a Zen master was that he had received inka in a dream 
from his deceased master. This claim raised more than a few eyebrows, but it 
was not at all unprecedented for hims to claim authority through some kind of 
nocturnal transmission.

Sufficient unto the day is the silliness thereof.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes (the P is for Protestant)
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes